The Swan
by Marco Pierre Black
Summary: Three parts to a long story. Not finished, but it will be. The beginning is a simple taster of what the story will be like, and the next two are exploring the characters. The third part is not finished, and is a work in progress.


There was a soft, pale reflection in the water which rippled with each tiny movement from amphibians underneath the water as they moved around to get food, or move to another location because an enemy of theirs was coming dangerously close.

A bird glided silently from the trees surrounding the water and gracefully landed on the water, making only a slight ripple on the now perfectly still water. It ruffled its feathers disdainfully when a single droplet of water landed on them, and then began moving around the water, looking down for the next victim which would become dinner.

The trees rustled quietly beside the water, and as the wind picked up, they began creaking slightly in protest of the sudden change of weather. A few of their dead leaves were pulled off, causing more creaking and silent screams, and blew off into the distance without so much as a glance back.

The sky darkened slightly, and the clouds rolled together. The wind began howling, screaming and ripping against grass and tree bark, starting to cause a slight path of destruction. The bird felt the on coming storm, and picked himself up and flew off; still as graceful, even with the wind beating against its outstretched wings.

There was one person standing there, witnessing the sudden changes in the small clearing. They stood there, silently, not being affected by the wind or loud clashes of thunder. They never once moved, not to upturn their collar against the bitterly cold wind nor to move out of the spot they were standing in. They didn't even appear to be breathing.

They were waiting, that much was obvious, for something to happen. There was no-one around to witness the actions that would follow, though.

The shadowy figure watched the bird come back to the water, and a smile played over their lips. They slowly, silently, started to walk towards the water. They outstretched their hands, and started mimicking strangling something.

The hands then dropped to their side and they silently stood by the waters edge, watching the bird, its long neck dipping underneath the water. The grey feathers acting as good as any waterproof covering, and letting the small water droplets slide carefully off of its sleek body, then splashing almost noiselessly in the water below.

The person reached slowly into their pocket, and brought out some stale bread crusts. They slowly knelt down and outstretched their right hand, offering the bird the bread. The bird, not one to pass up a free meal, made its way over to the offering.

The person smirked, and let the bird feast from the hand, then suddenly, without warning, grabbed the birds head.

The bird squawked, twisted against the iron grip it was in, and tried to pull away. Its eyes went wide and finally, it went silent. The person pulled their hood down, revealing themselves to be a man of around middle aged, with greying hair and hard, cold eyes.

He looked at the dead bird now floating away from his hand and then slowly got up, stretching as if he had been sitting in the same place for hours like a man in an office, and slowly started walking away.

His work, he thought to himself, had been done.

* * *

Joseph woke with a start when a clash of thunder banged loudly over, what felt like, his head. He jerked up and out of sleep, then watched the flash of lightning zigzag through his room before suddenly making a quick exit and leaving the room completely dark.

Sheets of rain pummelled the glass, and Joseph found himself wondering if the glass would shatter under the sheer weight of the water throwing itself haphazardly at the thin pane of glass.

He looked around him and registered, slowly, that he was not in his house. This was not his bed, and that was not his photographs on the bedside table. No, he wouldn't put such precious memories in such a littered manner on such a dirty surface.

He looked at the photographs for a while, laying on his right side staring at the faces staring back at him. The glass in each of the frames seemed dirty and showed signs that they hadn't been cleaned for a long time.

Joseph paused and looked at one photograph that caught his eye particularly. It was old and faded, like it had come straight from the 1960's. In it, stood a flawlessly beautiful woman with curly, dark hair, wearing a short dress that fell to her knees, and a smile that would warm the heart of the coldest person.

Joseph looked at her face for a while, taking in the small details of the sepia coloured photograph. She had rather large lips, but they weren't enhanced by surgery. Her eyes were large, and framed by perfectly made-up lashes. From the photograph her eyes looked to be a dark colour, but which colour that was, he couldn't tell.

He rolled over after a while, glancing out the window to see if the rain had let up any. It hadn't, which didn't surprise him, it was a bad storm, and it wouldn't give up just like that, but he had lost count of time while looking at the photographs. He looked at his watch and saw that the time was 2:34am. It was time to start moving.

First, he pulled himself slowly off the bed. This was always something he disliked doing, simply because it was moving from a warm and comfy place to the cold place where he was never completely able to see every part of the room, unless he stood with his back to the wall, which made other tasks, like getting dressed, impossible.

He dressed quickly, putting his clothes on in the same order he did everyday. First, the shirt, second the boxers and socks, then the trousers. He was happy, then, and sat down carefully on the bed and started to pull his shoes on.

The clock flickered beside him, the digits reading 2:54. The whole task of getting dressed had taken him longer than it normally did. Joseph grimaced; he had lost ten minutes of his day thanks to his paranoia.

He looked back to the window and saw that the rain, thankfully, had started to let up. It wasn't lashing against his window anymore and he couldn't hear the screaming wind anymore. He finished tying his shoes and looked back at the clock. 3:04am. He laughed and shook his head and picked himself off the bed, then grabbed his coat and left the building without so much as a glance back.

To say Joseph was shocked about finding the dead bird would be a slight understatement. He looked curiously at the body washed up on the shore, and he poked it slightly with his foot. He knew it was dead, that much was obvious, but what Joseph was really wondering was who, or what, had killed it.

He sat there staring at the bird for a while, pondering. There was only one explanation to the death of this poor creature. It must have been a human, that much was obvious, but Joseph had read, much to his disgust, that this was how serial killers where born. First, they preyed on animals, second it was something bigger, like genocide in the animal world, and then it was humans.

Joseph Barhydt sighed once again and turned his head away from the carcass, resting his head in his knees and trying not to think about the animal. It scared him that his normal routine had been so awfully disrupted. He couldn't figure out how to change it, but he started sweating slightly and feeling a little nauseous.

He pulled his arms tighter around his knees and fought back a sob that was threatening to burst out of his chest. He couldn't cry, not here, not now.

He looked at his watch carefully, trying to avoid looking at the bird and saw that it was now 4:56am. Something in his world really had gone wrong on this day.

He sat there on the floor and fought the dizzy feeling that was overwhelming him. It wasn't the worst day, he reasoned with himself, and he would get it back on track soon enough. There was nothing stopping him from enjoying the rest of the day.

But there was, and Joseph knew that this day was going to get worst, and he was going to be late for everything. Time was not on his side today, like it had been for the past year. Every single day it had been like clockwork, apart from June 4th, 1999. That had been the worst day of his life, he remembered, because of a trip to the hospital.

The hospital was, to be honest, Satan in disguise. There was no order there that they stuck to, and the timings were all off. If he knew that the day would turn into such a disaster, he would much rather have returned home and tended to the wounds himself.

He had been in a small, minor accident. This took him 14 minutes to get over the shock, and then when the paramedics got there, he lost count of the time. That meant he felt he didn't have control anymore, and he started to panic, as he couldn't ask anyone for the time, as they ignored his every request, simply wanting to get him out of the way so they could unload the next lot of patients and treat them.

He had left the hospital, an image of the room he had stayed in burned in his brain. That image would say with him for the rest of his life, and it would never leave him.

He looked at the time and yelped. 5:27 am. Why was it all going so wrong for him today? He looked at the dead bird again and thought about the hospital.

The same image haunted him badly, in his sleep and in his day-to-day life. He remembered it so clearly, like he had just stepped out of the room and was looking back at it.

The room was small, and while laying on the bed he had counted that the ceiling had 452 and a half tiles, half because someone had hacked away at one with boredom or depression and it had fallen away to reveal a yellowing material. The room, that meant, was not very big, and that had meant he had a lot of time to take in the details.

There was one bed in this room. The bed had been hard, like that you expect from a hospital, and uncomfortable. It had been covered in a white sheet that was itchy on his skin, and had left a rash. He didn't like to think about the people who had used the bed before him. It made him shiver when thinking of the germs that entered the room.

The bed had squeaked the moment he moved, the moment he sat down on it. He remembered that this had made his head spin, as he always chose beds that would be silent when he sat upon them, for the noise made his teeth grind together.

He had swallowed his fears and lay there, looking around the room. There was a small table placed to the left of his bed which held a few items. The items he saw were small pieces of paper, which he soon discovered were receipts, a pair of rubber gloves and a food tray placed there for him a while after he arrived. The rest of the room was standard hospital room. There were flowers towards the door, white tiled flooring which was dirty and grubby, although clean, the walls were white and grubby, also, from years of hands being pushed against them and people leaning against them. There was a single framed picture on the wall to the left of the window, and that was of a small girl holding a rather oversized teddy bear. The window was dirty, and had bars over it. This made him very uncomfortable.

He remembered the nurse clearly as she brought the food tray in. She was wearing the typical uniform, the white dress and white trainers, and had her hair tied up with a white ribbon. She had very nice hair, he remembered. It was dark and glossy, with slight waves. It had brought out her eyes, which were a dazzling shade of green.

Joseph had found himself comparing the green from her eyes to the green of the trees outside. He had only caught a few glimpses as he came in, but he had committed their colour to memory, so he could remember this day forever.

Colours, he found, helped him remember most of the things he saw in a day. He would then compare that colour to something he saw in front of him, like the pretty nurse to the horrible green of the trees.

He sighed contently. Her eyes were far more beautiful than the dank and horrible green the trees had been. There was something in her eyes, though, that he couldn't quite place. She looked lonely, that's for sure, but he couldn't quite tell why. She worked in a hospital, he reasoned, with people talking to her every single second of the day.

Joseph has almost laughed at himself when he thought that. Of course she would have a slightly far away look in her eyes; she sees death and pain all around her everyday of her life. She lives and breathes it, for God's sake. She has to be detached, otherwise this job wouldn't suit her in the slightest and she'd never get anywhere.

He had smiled at her the moment she came in the room, and it almost broke his heart when the smile that was returned wasn't a smile at all. He thought of it as more of a wince with a slight moving of the left side of her lip. He had then sighed, and she had left the room. The room, after she left, smelt faintly of cheap women's perfume.

* * *

Lauren Channing was the only nurse on call that morning. She had not yet been home, and had started her job yesterday at 5:01pm. She had been working straight ever since then it was now 7:00am the next morning.

Lauren had been told previously that they were low on staff, but she hadn't been planning on working this long. She was tired and she was sagging profusely. She couldn't handle much more of this.

She pushed the door open to her next patient and pulled the chart closer to her chest, trying to calm her nerves which were, to say the least, at their end. She was going to sort this one patient and then she would leave, she wouldn't care about the consequences. She might get fired, she reasoned with herself, but she was finally tired enough to leave and never come back.

Lauren smiled warmly, as warm as she could, at the small girl sitting in front of her on one of the standard hospital beds that she had recently cleaned and scrubbed until it nearly looked new again. She had changed the sheets that morning and had cleaned the room. Lauren sighed dejectedly; she had ended up doing what should have been the cleaners' job. She knew, though, that because she had done it she had done a better job, meaning that this room would be one of the cleanest in the hospital.

Lauren looked at the chart, all the numbers and words starting to swim in front of her vision. She had not been sleeping normally, and she knew that this was bad for her, and it made her job one hundred percent harder than it should have been.

"What seems to be the problem?" She asked the girl, trying to put the waves of weariness that were forcing themselves upon her. She looked at the girl with a watery smile and tried, once again, to read the chart.

"Miss," her small, soft voice which sounded like music to Lauren, "are you alright?"

"I think it's my job to be asking you that," Lauren replied, but couldn't help smiling. Bless her for worrying.

The girl looked up at her and smiled, then told her the problem. Her mother, it appeared, was in the hospital getting treatment for cancer. Lauren bit her lip and wondered how many patients today had died from cancer. She totalled one, but hopefully it wasn't her mother. Lauren had taken a shine to the little girl already, and she knew that with her job it was dangerous to get close to people inside the hospital. Lauren, though, found it difficult getting close to anyone. She didn't have a partner and she attended church to curb her loneliness that bit at her the moment she stepped from the dream world to reality.


End file.
